The idea that the United States of America, imperfectly but inexorably, embodied the liberal values of the Enlightenment as the vanguard nation of the modern world was Cold War common sense, consolidated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even when America was exceptionally bad, as in Iraq or Libya or Palestine, its cruelties and failures were obscured by a cloud of good intentions and the brute fact that it was the world’s economic and scientific superpower.

For the past half-century, the dream of American modernity seemed to capture the world’s imagination. America owned the past, with its mythic founding story; it owned the present, having defeated all challengers; and given its material wealth and technological innovation, it likely owned the future. When Barack Obama became president, the nation even seemed to have removed the moral stain of its original sin.

But less than 20 years later, as Donald Trump presides over gaudy celebrations of America’s 250th anniversary, the world has stopped believing that story.

From the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the genocide in Gaza twenty years later, the world turned: capitalism almost cracked up in 2008, China came into its own, and then Trump arrived. America’s standing in the world has been crumbling for years, but the people running the country didn’t get the memo. In the year of the semiquincentennial, American exceptionalism is a zombie movie, but the actors who manage its media, write its histories, organise its politics and plan its wars can’t see that they are the ones shambling along.

This spectacle of collapse has something to do with Donald Trump and his knuckle-dragging henchmen. The world watches in horror as the president threatens to annex Greenland and Canada, kidnaps the president of Venezuela, bombs Iran in concert with Israel, and helps Netanyahu achieve his genocidal aims in Gaza. In an age of satellites and ubiquitous streaming, where trees don’t fall unseen and innocents die on camera, rhetoric about a righteous republic sounds absurd.

But the tendency to blame Trump alone is mistaken. For one thing, there was no daylight between the Biden administration’s liberals and Trump’s lumpen crew when it came to complicity in Gaza. Only last week, the New Yorker published a detailed account of the agony of indecision that prevented Biden’s top foreign policy officials, Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken, from lifting a finger to stop the slaughter. Yet far from being their excuse for inaction, indecision is their claim to a conscience, a kind of dithering scrupulousness. At one moment in this interminable chronicle of self-pity, Blinken briefly acknowledges remorse, and then defensively quotes Biden: “Question my judgments. Don’t question my motives.”

From Jefferson to Blinken, an insistent benevolence has been the great exculpatory mantra of liberal pundits and historians, who forever assure us that the arc of American history bends towards justice. From the founding, when George Washington lobbied to ethnically cleanse Native Americans from their lands, when slavery was discreetly embedded in the constitution, through to Jim Crow and beyond, liberals have acknowledged the violence against America’s minorities without quite conceding that this violence might have deformed and stunted the exceptional republic.

This disavowal was on vivid display in the many worshipful essays written to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In The Atlantic, Eliot Cohen dealt with the matter of slavery by not dealing with it. “The English sage Samuel Johnson” he wrote, “had the most cutting put-down: ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ And he had a point.” Having brought up the subject, Cohen then stood it down by simply not returning to it.

Simon Schama’s essay in the Financial Times acknowledged the irony of the Declaration’s principal author being a slave owner, brought up Frederick Douglass’s famous repudiation of the Fourth of July, and reminded his readers that Reconstruction was cancelled in the year of the Centennial – but drew no historical conclusions from this record. So long as Americans acknowledged the atrocities committed in their name, honour was satisfied and they could go back to celebrating the visionary “original promise of the American Republic.”

This is the ‘moral stain’ gambit, whose next move inevitably cites the eventual extension of the franchise to Blacks and women as the moment that scrubs history clean. In Schama’s account, Americans should recognise the Republic’s failure to live up to the spirit of the Declaration and admire the Declaration’s precocious universalism. The task of explaining how the failure inflected the universalism is left unaddressed.

But the task of this essay is not to argue that America’s pundits and historians have misinterpreted the founding and its historical aftermath. It is to show, rather, that the arguments Americans have traditionally made to mitigate the brutality that drove the Republic’s history have warped America’s institutions, its laws, its people, and their view of the world.

So it is impossible to understand America’s place in the world today – a world that is losing the habit of trying to become more American – without attending to the stories Americans tell themselves about their nation. Liberal historians have rallied to the defence of American exceptionalism, in part to counter unflattering revisionist histories of the sort produced by The 1619 Project. Their efforts to rehabilitate the republic have been complicated by Trump’s second term: some have taken to mining American history for values and ideals to supply the ‘resistance’ with historical heft. Others have revisited that history for its cautionary tales.

A year before the semiquincentennial, the lauded American historian Joseph Ellis – whose bestselling biographies of the founders have helped establish 1776 as a landmark date in modern history – published an unusual book called The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding. It is an attempt to rethink the narrative of American exceptionalism that Ellis’s earlier work had nurtured. Alarmed by Trump’s ascension, he revisits the founding to remind Americans of the darkness that attended it, particularly the founders’ complicity in two great tragedies: slavery and the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans (known in the literature as Indian removal).

Ellis stops short of calling Indian removal a genocide. He prefers to think of it as a tragedy that couldn’t have been averted because the waves of European settlers hungry for land were unstoppable. He argues that Washington and his secretary of war, Henry Knox, had set themselves an impossible task, that they “made a heroic effort and they failed”. So keen is he to give his heroes a clean chit that he fails to mention Washington’s major conflict of interest: he was a land speculator who could only profit from his investments if Indian land was made available for settler purchase.

In the same way and at much greater length, Ellis shows how slavery was embedded in the constitution and how the racism it institutionalised became a recurring aspect of the republic’s history. He makes the point that there is a historical cadence to American racism: every concession won by black Americans was followed by a white backlash. Reconstruction’s brief dawn gave way to Jim Crow’s near-endless night. Here too, Ellis insists that the constitutional convention’s tacit recognition of slavery was forced upon the liberal founders, since the Southern states would not otherwise have joined. In this history, where the founders lack agency, slavery – like the violent relocation of Native Americans – becomes a no-fault tragedy.

Ellis’s contemporaries are even more trenchant in their apologias. Sean Wilentz, in his 2005 book The Rise of American Democracy, rejects the charge that Indian removal was a form of genocide or that Jacksonian democracy was founded on racism. He defends Jackson in the name of context and ‘nuance’.

The republic’s foreign wars of expansion – largely directed at non-white peoples – played out as extensions of the domestic subordination of African Americans and Native Americans. White soldiers in rigidly segregated armies experienced the violent conquest of non-white people as a kind of freedom.

Again, the point is not that Washington, Jefferson and Jackson were bad or hypocritical. No state is born in Edenic innocence. The point is that the rhetorical devices that historians, pundits and public men have used to paper over atrocity and preserve the myth of American exceptionalism – arguments from context, intention, lack of agency and complexity – have socialised Americans into living with discrimination at home and violence abroad, so long as it can be framed as force used in a liberal or patriotic cause.

One of the ways Western liberals have traditionally justified discrimination, whether in America or colonial India, is guardianship: the idea that the discriminated-against weren’t ready to be free. Today’s exceptionalism picks up this argument in reverse: what the historian Priya Satia has called ‘management of conscience’ allows liberals to believe past violence has since been redeemed by modern progress.

Not every American bought into these myths: Martin Luther King Jr. saw the American founding differently from his liberal contemporaries. As early as 1963, just twelve years after the Genocide Convention was formally adopted, King was unequivocal: “Our nation was born in genocide, when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race…We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population.”

For many African-American intellectuals, slavery and the racism it spawned are not merely historical. In his classic essay, “The Case for Reparations”, Ta-Nehisi Coates showed how several avatars of systematic racism – slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and redlining – condemned African Americans to poverty and the ghetto. If this racism is endemic, the first prerequisite to seeing America as the rest of the world does is to abandon the assumption of Whiggish progress and the article of faith that sustains it: that the United States has, uniquely, been a nation striving for the good.

This might allow Americans to see that Trump, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio are not aberrations. Trump is the founding’s dark obverse, Mr. Hyde to Obama’s Dr. Jekyll. The dilution of the Voting Rights Act by the Roberts Court – its bid to undo the progress of the Civil Rights era – can now be recognised as part of a familiar pattern. Trump’s nomination of white Afrikaners as victims of a “white genocide” who deserved asylum in the United States, Rubio’s nostalgia for the age of Western empires, Hegseth’s zeal to be ‘Secretary of War’ – these effronteries will not surprise anyone familiar with America’s history.

And yet, the Trump administration’s war of aggression against Iran isn’t a simple extension of the sequence fought under, say, the Bushes or Obama. These were wars in defence of American hegemony, justified by its ownership of the rights-based world order. Trump’s ugly endorsement of Israel’s plans for Gaza and his repeated attacks on Iran are, in fact, a symptom of America’s abandonment of its hegemonic claims. The bombing of Iran wasn’t preceded by the invocation of international law or the reassertion of humanitarian aspirations, as before the invasion of Iraq. A perfunctory nod at releasing Iran’s citizens from their theocratic oppression sufficed, without anyone taking it very seriously.

The broad American public support that Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza initially commanded was not necessarily a simple function of America’s own history – but that history could be drawn upon. The messianic claim to Greater Israel, the settler appetite for land, the dehumanisation of Palestinians as savage fanatics who understand only force: all these delusions resemble American myths about Red savages, manifest destiny, and the heroic idea of the frontier.

One of the luxuries of liberalism is the costless mea culpas that can be offered up to defeated or remnant peoples, like land acknowledgements in settler colonies. Historians like Schama are comfortable calling Indian removal “the first great exercise in ethnic cleansing...an act of absolutely horrifying cruelty and brutality.” But this categorical judgment is not applied to Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the kettling of its population into a small sliver of land. This is partly because Schama sees Netanyahu’s war on Gaza as a war on Hamas, and dead Palestinian civilians as collateral damage: it was Hamas that put civilians in harm’s way. He is sure it is not a genocide because Israel didn’t intend to kill the civilians who died, in much the same way that Andrew Jackson didn’t intend to kill the Native Americans who died on the Trail of Tears.

One difference between Gaza and the Trail of Tears is that the Palestinians are still around as a people and as a political cause. In Gaza and the West Bank, they resist expulsion and dispossession as best they can, and currently they command the sympathy and solidarity of more people in the world than Israel. These things take time: perhaps in a century, if Palestinians, reduced by ethnic cleansing and mass murder, are rehoused in reservations, some liberal chronicler will speak in chivalrous tones of their cruel suffering.

When Coates visited the West Bank in early 2023, he found it easy to compare the situation there to apartheid and Jim Crow. More than a few hostile critics accused him of coming late to the story, approaching it without the required nuance and complexity. Coates responded that what he saw in the West Bank wasn’t complex; it was simple.

Intention and complexity, those indispensable solvents of brute wickedness, show up in the aftermath of every atrocity. After Gaza, though, they don’t work their magic quite so well. This genocide was broadcast on tiny screens for months, then years. We grew accustomed to the evidence of our eyes.

Ironically, the antidote to the nostalgic celebration of American virtue in this anniversary year has been the president. Trump’s genius for being himself has demystified America and helped its citizens and others see the United States for what it is: a very powerful country with a lot going for it that has historically been quick to use violence to bend the world to its will. The essence of American exceptionalism, in the end, is neither Trump nor the Declaration of Independence, but the stubborn fantasy that the facts of the American present are always some aberration from its true nature.